Stephen King Audiobooks

Stephen King, born in 1947, is the American author the world calls the King of Horror – a title he earned with his 1974 debut Carrie and has spent five decades complicating. Alongside the horror he is best known for, he has written suspense, crime, science fiction, fantasy and mystery, plus roughly 200 short stories, some published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

The cultural footprint is hard to overstate. Films made from his fiction include Carrie, The Shining, Stand by Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and It – a list that would flatter any writer’s entire career, and for King is merely a selection. Different Seasons, his 1982 collection of four novellas, marked his first major departure from horror and showed the range beneath the brand.

The honours have followed: the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 2007 and the National Medal of Arts in 2014, among others. Joyce Carol Oates has described him as a brilliantly rooted, psychologically realistic writer of the American scene – which is the serious point beneath the scary covers.

Our catalogue catches King in several registers. On Writing, his memoir of the craft, is the book even people who avoid horror tend to love – half autobiography, half working manual, and in audio it lands like a masterclass delivered in person. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands shows the fantasist at work in the third instalment of his genre-crossing sequence, while The Tommyknockers is King in full unsettling flow.

Horror has always been a spoken form – the campfire predates the printed page – and King’s storytelling instincts carry into audio with unusual force. Between the craft talk of On Writing and the unease of The Tommyknockers, the shelf holds both the teacher and the practitioner, and either is a fine place for a UK listener to begin.